The difference between "Qt native" and "native native" (e.g. Win32 or Cocoa) is still noticeable if you pay attention, although it's not quite as obvious as between Electron and the former.
(Likewise, applications using the JVM may also look very convincingly like native ones, but you will feel it as soon as you start interacting with them.)
Is it really even worth highlighting though? I use Telegram Desktop (Qt) daily and it is always, 100% of the time completely responsive. It launches basically instantly the second I click the icon and the UI never hangs or lags behind input to a noticeable degree. If we transitioned to a world where everyone was writing Qt instead of Electron apps we would already have a huge win.
You're fundamentally mistaken about where Qt sits in the stack - it effectively sits in the same place as USER32/WinForms in Windows or NS/Cocoa GUI widgets of OSX. It is reasonable to think of it as an alternative native GUI library in that sense. If it is slower, it's because an implementation of something is slower, not because of where it lives or an abstraction cost.
Qt pretty much draws using low-level drawing APIs on the respective platform. And although Qt itself is not written in the most performance sensitive C++, it is still orders of magnitude faster than most (and it's not like Chrome doesn't pay overhead) - people rag on vtable dispatch speed but jeez its still orders of magnitude faster than something like ObjC which served Apple quite well for years.
The performance of a Qt app is more likely a function of the app itself and how the app developers wrote it.
But no, you're not noticing any micro-seconds differences in C++ overhead for Qt over "native native" - and you're basically comparing the GUI code of the platform - since Qt does it's own rendering. Win32 is mostly pretty good, NS is a mixed bag, and Gtk+ is basically a slug. In all cases there is some kind of dynamic dispatch going on, because that is a fundamental pattern of most GUI libraries. But dynamic dispatch is almost never a factor in GUI render performance. Things like recalculating sizes for 1 million items in a table on every repaint are the things that get people into trouble, and that is regardless of GUI library.
This gets said a lot, and granted VSCode is certainly one of the best performing Electron apps, but it definitely is not indistinguishable from native apps. Sublime, Notepad++, or TextAdept all fly compared to VSCode in terms of performance and RAM efficiency.
On Mac, VSCode does a better job than many apps at emulating the Cocoa text input systems but, like every electron app, it misses some of the obscure corners of cocoa text input system that I use frequently.
If we’re going to use JavaScript to write native apps, I’d really like to see things like React Native take off: with a good set of components implemented, it would be a first class environment.
I use VS Code daily (because it seems to be the only full-featured editor that Just Works(TM) with WSL), but it can get pretty sluggish, especially with the Vim plugin.
I don't think so, Microsoft wanted to fork electron in the past to replace Chromium with edgeHTML, but it didn't happen. VSCode is powered by Monaco Editor github.com/microsoft/monaco-editor, and VSCode feels snappier than let's say Atom, probably because of Typescript.
This is something with your configuration. OOB VSCode will immediately show you the file but disable tokenization and certain other features. I regularly open JSON files upto 10 MB in size without any problem. You probably have plugins which impede this process.
When you say web platform do you mean a browser? Using a browser is the mosted optimised and performant over installing an application on your desktop?
Curious what desktop do you run your browser under?
I would give you an example of a simple video split application. A web platform requires uploading, downloading and slow processing. A local app would be hours quicker as the data is local.
- Qt is actually the native toolkit of multiple operating systems (Jolla for instance and KDE Plasma) - you just need to have a Linux kernel running and it handles the rest.
It also does the effort of going to look for the user theme for widgets to mix in with the rest of the platform, while web apps completely disregard that.
- Windows has at least 4 different UI toolkits now which all render kinda differently (win32, winforms, wpf, the upcoming winui, whatever is using Office) - only Win32 is the native one in the original sense of the term (that is, rendering of some stuff was originally done in-kernel for more performance). So it does not really matter on that platform I believe. Mac sure is more consistent, but even then ... most of the apps I use on a mac aren't cocoa apps.
- The useful distinction for me (more than native and non-native) is, if you handle a mouse event, how many layers of deciphering and translation has it to go through, and are these layers in native code (eg. compiled to asm). As it reliably means that user interaction will have much less latency than if you have to go through interpreted code, GC, ...
Knowing what I know about Qt and what I've done with it in my day job, it's basically the best kept secret on hn. What they're doing with 6+licensing... I'm not sure how I feel, but from a pure multi-platform framework it really is the bees knees.
I've taken c++ qt desktop apps that never had any intention of running on a phone, built them, ran them, everything "just worked. I was impressed.
This is not really accurate. Qt relies on a lower level windowing system (X Window, Wayland, Cocoa, win32 etc. etc.).
Also worth noting that many creation-centric applications for the desktop (graphics, audio, video etc. etc.) don't look "native" even when they actually are. In one case (Logic Pro, from Apple), the "platform leading app from the platform creator" doesn't even look native!
> This is not really accurate. Qt relies on a lower level windowing system (X Window, Wayland, Cocoa, win32 etc. etc.).
Qt also supports rendering directly on the GPU (or with software rendering on the framebuffer) without any windowing system such as X11 or Wayland - that's likely how it is most commonly used in the wild, as that's one of the main way to use it on embedded devices.
Well, yes. I can't tell too much because of NDAs but if you go buy a recent car there is a good chance that all the screens are rendered with Qt on Linux or a RTOS - there is likely more of those than desktop linux users as much as this saddens me
On macOS Qt doesn’t really use Cocoa, it use Quartz/CoreGraphics (the drawing rather than the application layer). Note that Apple’s pro apps are native controls with a UI theme: they usually behave like their unthemed counterparts.
Kinda - QML is a programming language, Qt Quick is an UI scene graph (with the main way to use it being through QML) which also "renders everything" and makes by default less effort than widgets to look like the OS.
It's not platform-provided in my experience, but browser provided. The result of <button/> when viewed in a browser on macOS has no relation to the Cocoa API in any meaningful sense.
I'm pretty sure that when you render just a <button> in at least Safari, the browser will render a native Cocoa button control. If you set a CSS property like background colour or change the border, then it will "fall back" to a custom rendered control that isn't from the OS UI.
I did a small bit of research into this, and found plenty of "anecdotal" evidence, but nothing confirming for sure. I'm looking and interacting with the controls and they seem pretty native - if they're a recreation than that's pretty impressive :)
A GUI is a collection of elements with specific look and behaviour. A Desktop Environment is a collection of GUI(s), tools and services. Native means you have something which follows this look and behaviour 100% and can utilize all the tools and services.
Implementing the look is simple, adding behaviour quite harder and utilizing the service the endgame. WebUI usually does nothing from those or some parts, it all depends on the constellation. But usually there is a obvious difference at some point where you realize whether something is native or just made an attempt.
